With Insight360 moving into the next phase of delivery, the team have been busy working on system upgrades and incorporating feedback from the skippers who are co-designing the system to monitor potential incidents of bycatch in their fisheries.
Over the past months, Arribada’s Ben Tutt-Leppard and Al Davies have been down in Newlyn carrying out routine maintenance and updates to the Insight360 systems installed aboard the ringnetters involved in developing and trialling the tech, to ensure the systems on each vessel are running smoothly and ready to collect data when out at sea.
New features and functionality
The first iteration of Insight360, known as the Alpha system, was installed onboard the boats last August. Following six months of use, there were minor technical glitches to be logged by the engineering team, which have since been ironed out. Alongside this, extensive system upgrade development has taken place behind the scenes. After some final cable tweaks and testing, the brand new iteration of the Insight360 control box, known as the Beta system, has been installed onboard one of the Mevagissey gillnetters trialling the system.
Insight360’s upgraded Beta system
The upgraded system, with added features and functionality including improved speech-to-text software, will next be installed on the remaining four partner vessels for testing. With the newly upgraded system soon to start sea trials, the Insight360 team is making preparations ashore to process and inspect the additional data the upgraded systems will provide.
Supporting mitigation efforts around the coast
The aim is that the system will enable fishers to tell their fishing story, and at the same time meet the needs of science and policy to better monitor bycatch events. The needs of fishers, marine wildlife, researchers, and policy makers are top of the agenda for the Insight360 team, and form the foundation of Insight360’s co-design approach.
Ultimately, Insight360 is being developed to aid the marine wildlife bycatch mitigation efforts already underway around the UK’s coasts by the fishing community. The data collected by the system, which includes the audio insights offered by those fishing onboard and video footage of hauling events, will improve our understanding of bycatch.
Learning more about where and when bycatch happens – and similarly, where it doesn’t – can one day help prevent it from happening in the first place. Ensuring Insight360 can effectively support those efforts around the coast, in a way that works with fishers, will be a focus for the team over the remainder of the year.